Story Time - Week One
October 05, 2025
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The power of a story
We are storytelling creatures. One of our most fundamental, essential qualities as humans is our ability to link events together and draw meaning from them. Stories are crucial to language, history, critical thinking, scientific experimentation and theological imagination. This first week of our theme we think about the power of stories to encourage us, inspire us, challenge us and change our mind.
SEEDS TO SOW: What’s your favourite story? What do you like about it? What has it meant to you over the years?
Read Luke 5: 33-39
Up-cyling or recycling old wineskins…?
For most of us reading this parable it’s hard to even picture what a ‘wineskin’ looks like, but it would have been a common sight in that time and place. We could imagine Jesus saying “Nobody tries to run a new app on their old Windows 95 desktop.”
Q: How do you think the Pharisees would have reacted to what Jesus is saying here?
Q: And how do we respond to Christ’s challenge, to not force the next generation to wear the clothes of the past? Discuss how it could be time to wrestle with this teaching and what we can do to continue to store the new wine of the kingdom in a way that is accessible to all.
Read Luke 7: 36-50
The power of a story
The woman in this reading is going above and beyond and breaking established social rules. Meanwhile, Simon is following the etiquette but doing the bare minimum. It’s striking how Jesus is gentle with the person of low social status (the woman ‘who lived a sinful life’ ) whereas he’s much harder on the high status Pharisee. It’s Simon’s house, his food, his rules but he’s the one who finds himself out of his depth. So Jesus tells him a story.
Q: How might this story and a ‘forgiveness mindset’ have changed Simon’s life?
Q: And how does our forgiveness mindset affect how we express ourselves to others and God?
Read Luke 8: 16-18
No one puts a tarpaulin over a lit neon sign
Imagine a church making a huge neon welcome sign, switching it on, and then covering it in a big tarpaulin… The straightforward daftness of going to the bother to make a light only to hide it away helps us to explore the much more complex issue of the push and pull of our relationship with God.
We have been given a gift, a bright light to illuminate and guide us, to draw others, to help us to help others… and sometimes we accidentally or intentionally cover it up. We both welcome God in our lives and try to push God out of our lives.
Q: How does this story affect how we think about humanity’s relationship with God?
Q: Discuss how our churches could be more effectively advertising the place forgiveness plays in changing and transforming individuals and also society.
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